You’re dumbing down Hexagon?

What?

“Six warning signs you’re stupid”? Even spelt correctly, it’s, well… stupid. And smug. What triggered it? Tomorrow’s inauguration? The long-anticipated death of critical thinking? The total enshittification of everything?

I’m just trying something new.

Why?

Nobody’s subscribing.

I thought subscriptions were up.

They are, but only free subscribers. And followers, whatever they are. And fake AI bot accounts. But no new paid subscribers. Which, well…

Is perfectly understandable. People have only so much money. You should lower the price.

To what?

Two bucks a month. That’s affordable. If even a fraction of your free subscribers paid that…

Hexagon for 2 bucks a month!

And they would gladly if you just smartened up and gave them what they wanted.

Which is what?

Useful stuff.

Like?

Like, I don’t know. Definitely not six warning signs that they’re stupid. Stuff like which trendy Paris restaurants they should avoid, where to find the best croissants, what’s French for shit-for-brains, or why Macron has doomed the Fifth Republic. You know, useful French stuff.

Substack is awash in useful French stuff. Which is why I’m trying this new “Six Warning Signs” series.

But why start with “you’re stupid”? It’s arrogant and insulting.

It’s a joke. Covert irony. My readers will get it. They’re smart as whips. They’ll know it’s not about them but about stupidity in general.

Okay. So, what’s the first warning sign that you’re stupid?

That you opened this. That you’ve read all the way to here without moving on to something else.

What?

Stupidity is deceptive. People do stupid things and accept stupid ideas because they mistakenly believe that doing so will have beneficial results. As Robert Musil said – in the subtitle quoted above – if it were easy to tell stupidity apart from progress, ability, hope, and improvement, no one would want to be stupid.

Why would anyone “want” to be stupid?

You seem to.

No, seriously. Nobody wants to be stupid.

Except you, apparently.

Stop it. You do realise you’re me, right? That I created you?

Ha.

By the way, why do you always put quotes by famous people in your subtitles?

It lends authority.

It’s lazy and pretentious.

In your humble opinion.

IMHO, yes. Okay, let’s start again. How is progress, ability, hope and improvement confusingly similar to stupidity?

Think it through. Innovative, forward-thinking – so-called progress – often has terrible consequences. People confuse confidence or boldness with ability. Hope, when it becomes blind optimism or unquestioning faith, stops you from seeing what’s really going on. Improvement: efforts to make things better are more often than not based on a lack of proper judgment or understanding.

Examples?

The Hindenburg. Soviet collectivisation. Prohibition. Stalin’s Great Purge. DDT. Plastics. Thalidomide. Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Laetrile. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The War on Drugs. China’s One-Child policy. Conversion therapy. Enron. The American-led invasion of Iraq. Subprime mortgages. Glyphosate. Homeopathy. No Child Left Behind. Ethanol subsidies. Phonics-only reading. Brexit. Hydroxychloroquine. Employee tracking software. Should I continue? Recent examples are stupidly numerous. Cataloguing them would be like trying to count how many X posts are churned out by bots.

You’re a bot.

Says the bot.

We can’t all sit around prattling away on Substack. Nothing would get done. We have to take risks and explore new ideas. That’s what it means to be human.

The Encyclopédistes thought human stupidity was a curable disease caused by poor brain formation and the “languor of animal spirits”. Or both. Or by blocked nerves, or nerves that were too damp or slack. Or by the softness of the brain’s fibres, their lack of elasticity. Or the thickening of the humours, their aqueous and humid nature. Or the coldness of the blood and the “juices that serve the animal functions”.

“This is why people who live in the mountains or wetlands, hardened by work and sweating more from their extremities than from their heads, are more prone to stupidity. This is also why those who have received a proper education, who have been taught in the humanities and are accustomed to reflection, are less prone to stupidity than rustic people, in whom the habit of reflection has not been formed and the incapacity for actual reflection and judgment appears more noticeable.”1

That’s just the stupidest form of stupidity. What about stupidity’s higher forms?

What?

The higher, more pretentious forms of stupidity. The ones Musil said had overrun even the loftiest intellectual spheres, and were the most dangerous forms of disease facing humanity.2

Musil confessed he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. “I do not know what stupidity is. I have not discovered a theory of it, with whose help I could undertake to redeem the world… This may be due to my ignorance, but it is more likely that the question: What is stupidity? corresponds as little to the habits of thought today as the questions of what goodness, beauty or electricity are.”

Musil wrote that way back in 1937. To paraphrase what he said next, no one would dare to doubt that the world has seen progress and improvement since then. Can you imagine if he lived today? In a world where windmills beach whales and Jewish space lasers, longfin Delta smelts and diversity training cause wildfires in California? These days, only a complete idiot would try to say something intelligent about stupidity.

Stupid is as stupid does. Which goes without saying. And vice versa.

I’m not following.

That’s because you’re stupid.

I don’t think that’s fair. Or true.

You don’t think period. This is more your speed: six warning signs that you’re eating too much fat.

Enough. What’s the second sign that you’re stupid?

That you’re still reading this.

Stupidity isn’t in itself a bad thing. It fills and empties our coffers and fridges.

That makes no sense.

It’s driving our best and brightest to design and build 100 spaceships a year for the next 10 years to carry a million volunteer human colonists to the fourth planet from the sun.3

That’s ridiculous.

Maybe. Probably. Who’s to say? Let’s talk about those higher forms of stupidity. Musil described several types:

The naturally stupid: The “honourable” type, based on a simple limitation of cognitive abilities, uninfluenced by external factors.

The culturally stupid: their collective mindlessness stems from behaviours and beliefs backed by cultural norms and traditions that, over time, become accepted as unassailable truths.

The ideologically stupid: their particular brand of denseness results from dogma, from rigid, uncritical adherence to systems of ideals or ideas. Most ideologically stupid people adopt these to “fit in”, or because they’re afraid of being insignificant or dead, or because they don’t have the time or wherewithal to think for themselves.

The morally stupid: theirs is caused by adherence to moral conventions and societal rules without any understanding of the underlying principles. Examples: ignoring climate change, being a racist, advocating eugenics, turning a blind eye to corruption or the suffering of others, lacking empathy for people who think differently, “just following orders”, al...